Written by Jonathan Wojcik
October 1st: Return to Big Lots!
I feel like I should have something more important for the first of October, but I already kicked off my Mortasheen Halloween Advent Calendar Thing, so now we're just going to talk about Big Lots again. You might also want to start following Dinosaur Dracula's Creepy Commercials Countdown!
Yeah, we already went over some Big Lots stuff weeks ago, but that was so early in the season, they weren't even done stocking everything. There's even a screecher I missed, a really nice looking purple-tinged Dracula, though what we're really here to discuss are the danglers.
Last year, Big Lots brought us this instantly lovable bag-faced mutant, which remains the coolest "dangler" decoration I've yet to encounter, but their 2012 wave definitely has some unique...quirks.
We'll start with the most "ordinary" of the bunch, which is still pretty striking; a skeleton whose eye sockets are filled with scarlet muscular tissue. I've really never seen this done before. It's always totally empty sockets, or monstrous eyes. Certainly never just meat.
The Frankenstein's Monster might be one of the most disturbing I've ever seen, with his look of pure anguish, bloody stitches and, again, a complete lack of eyes. Trust me, they're not just shut. I know what eyelids look like without any eyeballs in them. I know intimately.
The ghost is rather terrifying if you've had a lifelong phobia of Doctor Seuss characters, like my friend Kristina. She can't even look at this picture. The face is totally modeled after the Grinch (the worst of all, for Kristy) but in more grotesquely lifelike detail, fleshy and wrinkly instead of furry. It's not so much a ghost as it is some naked, subterranean mole-Grinch.
Last but certainly not least of the danglers are these sad and hilarious vampires, every single one of which was horribly warped and malformed like this. They look happy, at least, or as happy as a boneless, brainless Dracula can reasonably be, which is actually probably very happy, all the time. Wouldn't you be?
The creepiest creatures of all, however, weren't even Halloween related. You have no idea how much longer I stood staring at these nightmares even before I started recording. They didn't stop the entire time we were there, and they didn't stop being hilarious, either. At last, a Decemberfest item that speaks the truth.
HALLOWEEN 2012 ARCHIVE:
